“What about?”
The smith was silent, and went to stirring ashes with a toe again.
“If he complains of you to the manor court you will be compelled to speak.”
“He’ll not, I think.”
“Why? Because he brought the first blow?”
“Aye…there’s that,” Edmund agreed.
“And there is more?” I waited, but received no reply.
I was sure there was more to this tale but could not get it from the smith. I gave up, waved his captors off, and set out for the castle with my instrument box tucked under my arm. Alice was waiting for me at the bridge, gazing down into the brook. Her hands were free of the baker’s blood. She must have washed them in the stream.
“You did well,” I told her, and joined her at the rail.
“Will the baker live?” she asked.
“Aye. Unless he attacks the smith again before his wound heals.”
“Would ’e ’ave died had you not sewed ’im up?”
“Probably.”
Alice was silent for a moment, staring upstream at the mill and its wheel. I was about to suggest that she would be needed at the castle when she spoke.
“Did you see me brother?”
“Your brother? Where?”
“In the crowd, watchin’ as you sewed up the baker.”
“I paid little attention. Which brother?”
“Henry.”
Alice had two half-brothers, born of her father’s first marriage. These two were angered when their father married a second time, fearing loss of patrimony. What they expected to gain from their father, a poor cotter with a quarter yardland and a scrawny pig, I cannot tell.
Henry, I presume, gained his father’s quarter yardland, the hut, and anything Alice left in it. He is a tenant of the Bishop of Exeter. I am not informed of the business of that manor in the Weald, though the property be but across Mill Street from the castle.
“I was anxious for Philip,” I said. “I remember Will Shillside looking on, and a few others. I did not notice your brother.”
“He was at the edge of the crowd. I saw ’im when I came up wi’ the lad you sent t’fetch the box.”
She looked down at my instrument case. I could not tell where this conversation was going. Perhaps nowhere, for Alice became silent again. I am a patient man. The girl had, I thought, more to say. I listened to the mill wheel creaking as it turned, and to the splash of water through the sluice. We were so still and silent that a small trout ventured out from the shadow of the bridge and positioned itself below us, waiting for the current to bring a meal its way.
“I saw ’em when I was kneelin’…when you asked for help.”
“Saw what?”
“The shoes. I was down close to the ground, like, an’ you notice things down there you don’t when standin’ up.”
“Your brother’s shoes?” I guessed. I had a feeling I now knew what the girl wanted to say, and why she found it difficult.
“Aye. Him as hardly ever owned any, as I remember. Least, not like them ’e wore today.”
“Did he never wear shoes, even in winter?”
“Oh, aye…but made ’em hisself. Never paid cobbler for shoes.”
“And what of the shoes he wore today?”
“Wood soles. Thick, like they was new, an’ leather t’bind ’em to ’is feet. Soft leather, ’twas. Tanned.”
“Like those missing from the feet of Alan the beadle?”
Alice nodded her head and gazed back toward the mill. For all the mistreatment she had endured at her brother’s hands, she no doubt felt disloyal for bringing me this report. And, perhaps, apprehensive that her brother might learn of her disclosure.
The girl remained silent, her eyes on the turning mill wheel but not, I think, seeing it.
“The blue yarn,” she whispered. “Henry once had a cotehardie of blue. ’Twas old and faded last I saw it.”
“Threadbare?” I asked.
“Aye…tattered, like.”
“So that loose threads might fall from, say, a ragged sleeve?”
“Aye.”
“When did you last see your brother wear such a garment?”
“Before I came t’live in castle, sir. I see little of Henry now, so what he owns I know not, but ’twas before father died I last saw ’im wi’ the old blue cotehardie.”
“You have performed two good services this day,” I told her. “I will see to this business of your brother’s new shoes and old blue cotehardie. Rest easy. He will not learn how my suspicion was aroused.”
A look of relief brightened her face.
“Run back to the castle and explain my absence at dinner to the cook. Ask him to send a meal to my chamber. I will be there straightaway.”
“Aye, sir,” she chirped, and set off as I directed. I watched with pleasure as she hastened away. Well, there was nothing much else to look at; I had already viewed the mill and stream.
Chapter 5
After a cold dinner in my reeking chamber I made my way across Mill Street to the path leading along Shill Brook and the cottages in the Weald. These were the bishop’s tenants. I had not had cause to venture down this lane since I treated Alice’s father, unsuccessfully, for his broken hip.
His hut lay in disrepair, the toft overgrown and the door fallen from its leather hinges. Whatever of the man’s possessions his sons thought valuable enough to keep from Alice, this dwelling was not among them.
I did not know which of the next two huts belonged to Henry atte Bridge. I rapped on the door of the first, which was ajar, and was rewarded for my efforts by the appearance of a disheveled woman of indeterminate age carrying a basin on one hip and a runny-nosed child on the other. Both mother and child appeared to have taken seriously the maxim that winter bathing might cause serious health issues.
Henry, the woman said, lived in the next hut. She was the wife of his brother, Thomas. The wife of a quarter yardland tenant cannot lead an easy life, I reflected, as I gave her thanks and left her to her pot and child.
The next dwelling gave a better first impression. The roof was newly thatched, and freshly oiled skins stretched across the windows. I thumped on the door to no result but sore knuckles. In the silence between my assaults on the door I heard distant voices. After a third attempt at the door I gave up and circled the house to the garden toft in the rear.
A woman was there, spading manure into her vegetable beds. It was her voice I had heard, directing children who were assisting in the work by breaking the clods she turned over. The woman used an iron spade. This surprised me. Most cotters can afford only wooden tools with which to work their land.
This woman was as robust as her sister-in-law was frail. And also the children appeared well fed. She rested a foot on the shovel and eyed me suspiciously as I approached. The appearance of a lord’s bailiff seems often to create that expression on the faces of the commons.
“Good day,” I greeted her in my most cordial tone.
The woman remained silent, as if there was no need to reply if she had no argument about the quality of the day.
“Is your husband at home?”
“Nay,” she finally spoke. “Workin’ on the bishop’s new tithe barn.”
I knew of that project. The Bishop of Exeter, in a fit of abundance, had ordered his old tithe barn at Bampton demolished and a new and greater structure raised in its place.
Beams had been hewed over the winter, and now the framework was rising on the bishop’s land north of the town. I remember Master John Wyclif speaking of a passage in the Gospel of St Luke where our Lord spoke to his disciples about a wealthy man who pulled down an old barn and built a greater one, but died before he could enjoy the wealth he had stored there. I tactfully avoided mentioning this scripture when discussing the new barn with Thomas de Bowlegh, whose duty it is to oversee construction for the bishop.
Master John, I think, would not be so considerate, for I often heard him condemn prelates for their venality. The criticism of an Oxford master, however, is of little consequence to those in Avignon.
I told the woman I would return in the evening to speak to her husband and made my way around the house to return to the castle. As I passed the gable end a gust of wind brought the scent of roasting meat to my nostrils. I looked up to the gable vent. Wisps of smoke, common enough from such a hut, drifted from the opening.